From the Shelves of the Paco Library

“Ego,” wrote the late Alec Guinness in the introduction to his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, “as a very young person, with no professional experience, assumes that his natural place in the scheme of things is up-stage centre but quickly learns that, for a long time to come, he must be down-stage, very much to the side, and with his back half turned to the audience…The bold statement is never likely to be his: he is well aware he is not in the same class as Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud or the other greats. His pleasure is in putting little bits of things together, as if playing with a jig-saw puzzle.” Thus the late Sir Alec, in typically self-effacing fashion, outlines an acting career characterized by roles which were marvels of understated elegance and subtlety, and, his protestations notwithstanding, considerably more important than simply “putting little bits of things together.”

Blessings is another in the long line of well-written autobiographies turned out by British actors, and is an enthralling book of reminiscences which includes admirable word-portraits not only of the author, but of the many other greats of stage and silver screen. For example, here is an incident involving the marvelously quirky Sir Ralph Richardson:

Some time ago, three days after an operation for a hernia and sitting up in a hospital bed, the door to my room was pushed slowly open. It was a Sunday afternoon and all was very quiet and dreary. I looked at the door expecting to see someone at eye level but the figure that entered was on the ground. Pushing a pile of books before him Ralph crawled on all fours.

‘Who,’ he asked immediately, ‘is Miss Mackenzie?’

‘Never heard of her,’ I replied.

‘She is your next-door neighbour. Shall we have her in?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, ‘she’s probably just had an operation. Like I have.’

Ralph deposited the books on my bed and went to the adjoining wall and thumped on it.

‘Miss Mackenzie? This is Ralph Richardson. I am in Alec Guinness’s room. We would like you to visit us. Do you hear me, Miss Mackenzie?’

There was an ominous silence, but Ralph continued in spite of my protests.

‘Are you lonely, Miss Mackenzie? Guinness is lonely too. He would appreciate your company.’

He sat on my bed, chatting for ten minutes, explaining how eyes were first formed by sea-worms rubbing against rocks, and then left the room, again on all fours. He must have had a very good lunch. I forgot about his visit until the floor sister woke me the following morning.

‘Wasn’t it awful about Miss Mackenzie!’ she said cheerfully.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked with some apprehension.

‘Apparently she thought she heard strange voices and in the night she got up – she is very ill – and ran out of the hospital in her nightgown and went screaming around Bryanston Square before she was caught. Now she is heavily sedated.’

‘Poor thing,’ I said, and opened one of Ralph’s books.

Sir Alec’s beginnings are somewhat shrouded in mystery: “My birth certificate registers me as Alec Guinness de Cuffe, born in Marylebone, London, 2nd April 1914. My mother at the time was Miss Agnes Cuffe; my father’s name is left an intriguing, speculative blank.” When he was five years old, his mother married an army Captain, an imperious and irritable man who had suffered shell-shock in the First World War. After graduating from private school, Guinness worked as a copy-writer in advertising, but turned to acting in 1936, debuting in a production of Hamlet. He continued on the stage until the outbreak of World War II, when he served as an officer in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Some of his naval anecdotes are among the best parts of the book; here he writes of an incident that occurred after he took charge of an LCI in the United States:

[W]e sailed from New York and straight into trouble. In Chesapeake Bay, across the entrance to the estuary of the James River, there was a great defense boom. Night had fallen, weather conditions were appalling, there were no navigational aids (I could spread out the excuses) and I managed to get one third of my ship straddled across the boom designed, so they thought, to stop penetration by the enemy.

We struggled off our spider’s web in an hour or so, thanks to the patience of the engine-room staff and our excellent unflappable Geordie coxswain. Visibility was nil, so, having backed away from the boom, I dropped anchor. The first light of day was an alarming revelation; together with half a dozen other LCIs we had anchored in the middle of a minefield. The tide had gone down and the mines could be seen a foot below the surface, slowly swaying like sinister black balloons.

Obviously, Guinness survived that dangerous episode and went on to a highly-acclaimed career in movies (one of my personal favorites is Kind Hearts and Coronets, a black comedy in which Guinness played eight different roles). Blessings is an extremely witty memoir that is destined to be a classic (if it is not one already) of stage and movie history – as well as the personal testimony of a genuinely modest man of more than modest talent.